Sunday, September 13, 2015

I'll be at table N10 at this year's SPX next weekend, September 19th and 20th. Dave Plunkert is sharing the table with me. I'll have copies of TERROR ASSAULTER: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) as well as the BLADES & LAZERS Collection, original artwork, among other things.

If
you can imagine Fletcher Hanks collaborating with Larry Hama or Chuck
Dixon on a Jack Kirby-inspired, deadpan G.I. Joe parody that was
serialized in the back of Playboy in the late 1980s, well, you’d be
pretty darn close to what Marra has come up with here. You’d just have
to multiply that by a factor of 10 or 20.

[T]here’s something to be said for subtlety, for a kind of liminal
intelligence that requires the reader to do the heavy lifting, to read
in between the lines, to draw conclusions that may not be obvious ...
This is the mode in which Benjamin Marra’s new graphic novel, “Terror
Assaulter (O.M.W.O.T.),” operates. On the surface, there is nothing
subtle about Marra’s work- this is a
comic whose cover features a sunglasses-clad secret agent with a
cigarette dangling from his mouth decapitating a chainsaw wielding
barbarian with a samurai sword- but it’s this very lack of subtlety
where the intelligence of “Terror Assaulter” lies. Marra plays on genre
conventions, drawing from 80s and 90s action films and comics, in what
is ultimately a profoundly thoughtful post-structuralist decoding of the
social constructs of gender, authority and violence, and the ways in
which these ideas collide within popular culture

Fantagraphics' new version of Terror Assaulter: OMWOT is actually a
full-length graphic novel expanding on a 32-page mini-comic that Marra
put out last year — and that minicomic might be my favorite thing that
he's ever done. Like all of Marra's Traditional Comics, it's an
over-the-top tribute to the black-and-white boom of the late '80s, but
OMWOT takes it a step further. It's the
comic that the weird kid in your class would draw after half-watching an
"erotic thriller" on cable in 1992, in the absolute best way, and the
single greatest gag in the whole thing is that everyone — everyone — is
constantly just bluntly stating what they're doing, as they do it, with
no inflection or emphasis."

Nothing is spared in this searing and hilarious indictment of US foreign
policy over the last decade, whether it be neocon philosophy, the state
of American masculinity and sexuality or the male power fantasy in
escapist entertainment.

The Onion's AV Club reviews TERROR ASSAULTER: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror). Check it out here. Here's a quote:

A satirical graphic novel about America’s short-sighted foreign policy
and the relationship between sex and violence in American male power
fantasies... This preview just scratches the surface of the insanity
Marra brings to the pages of this graphic novel, and readers can check
out more of this twisted satire when Terror Assaulter (O.M.W.O.T.) hits
stands at the end of the month.